Following the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate. The German state had ceased to exist, and sovereign authority passed to the victorious Allied powers. The physical devastation from Allied bombing campaigns and from ground battles was enormous: an estimated one-fourth of the country’s housing was destroyed or damaged beyond use, and in many cities the toll exceeded 50 percent. Germany’s economic infrastructure had largely collapsed as factories and transportation systems ceased to function. Rampant inflation was undermining the value of the currency, and an acute shortage of food reduced the diet of many city dwellers to the level of malnutrition. These difficulties were compounded by the presence of millions of homeless German refugees from the former eastern provinces. The end of the war came to be remembered as “zero hour,” a low point from which virtually everything had to be rebuilt anew from the ground up.

For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones. The American, British, and French zones together made up the western two-thirds of Germany, while the Soviet zone comprised the eastern third. Berlin, the former capital, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone, was placed under joint four-power authority but was partitioned into four sectors for administrative purposes. An Allied Control Council was to exercise overall joint authority over the country.

These arrangements did not incorporate all of prewar Germany. The Soviets unilaterally severed the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers and placed these under the direct administrative authority of the Soviet Union and Poland, with the larger share going to the Poles as compensation for territory they lost to the Soviet Union. The former provinces of East Prussia, most of Pomerania, and Silesia were thus stripped from Germany. Since virtually the entire German population of some 9.5 million in these and adjacent regions was expelled westward, this amounted to a de facto annexation of one-fourth of Germany’s territory as of 1937, the year before the beginning of German expansion under Hitler. The Western Allies acquiesced in these actions by the Soviets, taking consolation in the expectation that these annexations were merely temporary expedients that the final peace terms would soon supersede.

As a result of irreconcilable differences among the Allied powers, however, no peace conference was ever held. The issue of German reparations proved particularly divisive. The Soviet Union, whose population and territory had suffered terribly at the hands of the Germans, demanded large-scale material compensation. The Western Allies initially agreed to extract reparations but soon came to resent the Soviets’ seizures of entire German factories as well as current production. Under the terms of inter-Allied agreements, the Soviet zone of occupation, which encompassed much of German agriculture and was less densely populated than those of the other Allies, was to supply foodstuffs to the rest of Germany in return for a share of reparations from the Western occupation zones. But when the Soviets failed to deliver the requisite food, the Western Allies found themselves forced to feed the German population in their zones at the expense of their own taxpayers. The Americans and British therefore came to favour a revival of German industry so as to enable the Germans to feed themselves, a step the Soviets opposed. When the Western powers refused in 1946 to permit the Soviets to claim further reparations from their zones, cooperation among the wartime allies deteriorated sharply. As day-by-day cooperation became more difficult, the management of the occupation zones gradually moved in different directions. Even before a formal break between East and West, opposing social, political, and economic systems had begun to emerge.

Despite their differences, the Allies agreed that all traces of Nazism had to be removed from Germany. To this end, the Allies tried at Nürnberg 22 Nazi leaders; all but three were convicted, and 12 were sentenced to death (see Nürnberg trials). The Soviets summarily removed former Nazis from office in their zone of occupation; eventually, antifascism became a central element of East Germany’s ideological arsenal. But, since the East German regime denied any connection to what happened in Germany during the Nazi era, there was little incentive to examine Nazism’s role in German history. The relationship of Germans to the Nazi past was more complex in West Germany. On the one hand, many former Nazis survived and gradually returned to positions of influence in business, education, and the professions, but West German intellectuals were also critically engaged with the burdens of the past, which became a central theme in the novels of Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and many others.

On into the 21st century, the Holocaust casts a dark shadow across German politics and culture. Historians have debated the place of anti-Semitism in German history: How much did the German people know about the murder of the Jews? How many approved of the "final solution" carried out by the Nazi government? Was the Holocaust the result of a uniquely powerful and deeply rooted German hatred of Jews, as some historians have argued (e.g., Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust [1996])? Or, did the Holocaust arise within the violent context of war, leading ordinary men to commit crimes that would otherwise have been unthinkable?

Beginning in the summer of 1945, the occupation authorities permitted the formation of German political parties in preparation for elections for new local and regional representative assemblies. Two of the major leftist parties of the Weimar era quickly revived: the moderate Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) and the German Communist Party (Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands; KPD), which was loyal to the Soviet Union. These were soon joined by a new creation, the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union; CDU), with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union; CSU). The leaders of this Christian Democratic coalition had for the most part been active in the moderate parties of the Weimar Republic, especially the Catholic Centre Party. They sought to win popular support on the basis of a nondenominational commitment to Christian ethics and democratic institutions. Germans who favoured a secular state and laissez-faire economic policies formed a new Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei; FDP) in the Western zones and a Liberal Democratic Party in the Soviet zone. Numerous smaller parties were also launched in the Western zones.

Under pressure from the occupation authorities, in April 1946 the Social Democratic Party leaders in the Soviet zone agreed to merge with the Communists, a step denounced by the Social Democrats in the Western zones. The resulting Socialist Unity Party (SED) swept to victory with the ill-concealed aid of the Soviets in the first elections for local and regional assemblies in the Soviet zone. However, when in October 1946 elections were held under fairer conditions in Berlin, which was under four-power occupation, the SED tallied fewer than half as many votes as the Social Democratic Party, which had managed to preserve its independence in the old capital. Thereafter the SED, which increasingly fell under communist domination as Social Democrats were systematically purged from its leadership ranks, avoided free, competitive elections by forcing all other parties to join a permanent coalition under its leadership.

The occupying powers soon approved the formation of regional governmental units called Länder (singular Land), or states. By 1947 the Länder in the Western zones had freely elected parliamentary assemblies. Institutional developments followed a superficially similar pattern in the Soviet zone, but there the political process remained less than free because of the dominance of the Soviet-backed SED.

When it had become apparent by 1947 that the Soviet Union would not permit free, multiparty elections throughout the whole of Germany, the Americans and British amalgamated the German administrative organs in their occupation zones in order to foster economic recovery. The resulting unit, called Bizonia, operated through a set of German institutions located in the city of Frankfurt am Main. Its federative structure would later serve as the model for the West German state.

In the politics of Bizonia, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats quickly established themselves as the major political parties. The Social Democrats held to their long-standing commitment to nationalization of basic industries and extensive government control over other aspects of the economy. The Christian Democrats, after initially inclining to a vaguely conceived “Christian socialism,” swung to espousal of a basically free-enterprise orientation. In March 1948 they joined with the laissez-faire Free Democrats to install as architect of Bizonia’s economy Ludwig Erhard, a previously obscure economist who advocated a “social market economy,” essentially a free-market economy with government regulation to prevent the formation of monopolies or cartels and a welfare state to safeguard social needs.

When repeated meetings with the Soviets failed to produce four-power cooperation, the Western occupying powers decided in the spring of 1948 to move on their own. They were particularly concerned about the deteriorating economic conditions throughout occupied Germany, which burdened their own countries and awakened fears of renewed political extremism among the Germans. The Western powers therefore decided to extend to their occupation zones American economic aid, which had been instituted elsewhere in western Europe a year earlier under the Marshall Plan. To enhance the effectiveness of that aid, the Americans, British, and French effected a currency reform in their zones that replaced Germany’s badly inflated currency (the Reichsmark) with a new, hard deutsche mark, or DM. Western Germany’s economy responded quickly, as goods previously unavailable for nearly worthless money came onto the market.

The Soviets responded angrily to the currency reform, which was undertaken without their approval. When the new deutsche mark was introduced into Berlin, the Soviets protested vigorously and boycotted the Allied Control Council. Then in June 1948 they blockaded land routes from the Western zones to the Western sectors of the old capital, which were surrounded by territory occupied by the Soviet Red Army and lay about 100 miles (160 km) from the nearest Western-occupied area. By sealing off the railways, highways, and canals used to deliver food and fuel, as well as the raw materials needed for the factories of Berlin’s Western sectors, with a population of more than two million people, the Soviets sought to drive out their erstwhile allies and to force the Western sectors to merge economically and politically with the Soviet zone that surrounded them. They were thwarted, however, when the Western powers mounted an around-the-clock airlift that supplied the West Berliners with food and fuel throughout the winter of 1948–49. In May 1949 the Soviets relented and lifted the blockade.

Formation of the Federal Republic of Germany

Instead of halting progress toward the political integration of the Western zones, as the Soviets apparently intended, the Berlin blockade accelerated it. In April 1949 the French began to merge their zone into Bizonia, which became Trizonia. That September a Parliamentary Council of 65 members chosen by the parliaments of the Länder began drafting a constitution for a West German government. Twenty-seven seats each in this council were held by the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, five by the Free Democrats, and the rest by smaller parties, including two by the Communists. The Council completed its work in the spring of 1949, and the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), commonly known as West Germany, came into being in May 1949 after all the Länder except Bavaria had ratified the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), as the constitution was called to underline the provisional nature of the new state. Indeed, this document specified that it was designed only for temporary use until a constitution had been freely adopted by the German people as a whole.

The Basic Law was approved by the Western Allied military governors with certain reservations, notably the exclusion of West Berlin, which had been proposed as the federation’s 12th Land. The 11 constituent Länder of West Germany, then, were Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Hessen, Lower Saxony, North Rhine–Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, Baden, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern (the last three were merged in 1952 to form Baden-Württemberg, and in 1957 Saarland became the 10th Land).

By the terms of the Basic Law, the Federal Republic of Germany was established with its provisional capital in the small city of Bonn. The West German state took shape as a federal form of parliamentary democracy. An extensive bill of rights guaranteed the civil and political freedoms of the citizenry. In keeping with German traditions, many spheres of governmental authority were reserved for the individual Länder. The key locus of power at the federal level lay in the lower legislative chamber, the Bundestag, elections for which had to take place at least every four years. The deputies were chosen by a voting procedure known as “personalized proportionality,” which combined proportional representation with single-seat constituencies. In order to minimize the proliferation of smaller political parties that had helped to discredit democracy in the Weimar Republic, a party had to win a minimum of 5 percent of the overall vote to gain representation in the Bundestag. The Länder were represented in the upper legislative chamber, the Bundesrat, whose members were designated by the governments of the Länder, their number varying according to the states’ populations. The chancellor, elected by the Bundestag, headed the government; however, in response to the misuse of presidential power in the Weimar Republic, the constitution greatly reduced the powers of the president, who was chosen indirectly by a federal convention. The final key institution of the Federal Republic was the Federal Constitutional Court. Independent of both the legislative and executive branches, it successfully introduced into German practice for the first time the American principle of judicial review of legislation. Its seat was established in the city of Karlsruhe.

Initially, West Germany was not a sovereign state. Its powers were circumscribed by an Occupation Statute drawn up by the American, British, and French governments in 1949. That document reserved to those powers ultimate authority over such matters as foreign relations, foreign trade, the level of industrial production, and all questions relating to military security. Only with the permission of the Western occupation powers could the Federal Republic legislate or otherwise take action in those spheres. Alterations in the Basic Law required the unanimous consent of the three Western powers, and they reserved veto power over any legislation they deemed unconstitutional or at variance with occupation policies. In the event of an emergency that endangered the new West German government, the Western Allies retained the right to resume their full authority as occupying powers.

Formation of the German Democratic Republic

When it became clear that a West German government would be established, a so-called election for a People’s Congress was held in the Soviet occupation zone in May 1949. But instead of choosing among candidates, voters were allowed only the choice of approving or rejecting—usually in less-than-secret circumstances—“unity lists” of candidates drawn from all parties, as well as representatives of mass organizations controlled by the communist-dominated SED. Two additional parties, a Democratic Farmers’ Party and a National Democratic Party, designed to attract support from farmers and from former Nazis, respectively, were added with the blessing of the SED. By ensuring that communists predominated in these unity lists, the SED determined in advance the composition of the new People’s Congress. According to the official results, about two-thirds of the voters approved the unity lists. In subsequent elections, favourable margins in excess of 99 percent were routinely announced.

In October 1949, following the formation of the Federal Republic, a constitution ratified by the People’s Congress went into effect in the Soviet zone, which became the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), commonly known as East Germany, with its capital in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The People’s Congress was renamed the People’s Chamber, and this body, together with a second chamber composed of officials of the five Länder of the Soviet zone (which were abolished in 1952 in favour of centralized authority), designated the communist Wilhelm Pieck of the SED as president of the German Democratic Republic on October 11, 1949. The next day, the People’s Chamber installed the former Social Democrat Otto Grotewohl as premier at the head of a cabinet that was nominally responsible to the chamber. Although the German Democratic Republic was constitutionally a parliamentary democracy, decisive power actually lay with the SED and its boss, the veteran communist functionary Walter Ulbricht, who held only the obscure position of deputy premier in the government. In East Germany, as in the Soviet Union, the government served merely as the agent of an all-powerful communist-controlled party, which was in turn ruled from above by a self-selecting Politburo.

Political consolidation and economic growth, 1949–69

The government that emerged from the Federal Republic’s first general election in August 1949 represented a coalition of the Christian Democrats with the Free Democrats. Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union, a veteran Roman Catholic politician from the Rhineland, was elected the country’s first chancellor by a narrow margin in the Bundestag. Because of his advanced age of 73, Adenauer was expected by many to serve only as an interim officeholder, but in fact he retained the chancellorship for 14 years. Theodor Heuss of the Free Democratic Party was elected as West Germany’s first president. As economics minister in the Adenauer cabinet, Ludwig Erhard launched the Federal Republic on a phenomenally successful course of revival as a social market economy. His policies left the means of production mainly in private hands and allowed market mechanisms to set price and wage levels. The government promoted social justice with measures designed to ensure an equitable distribution of the wealth generated by the pursuit of profit. Under these policies, industrial output rapidly recovered, living standards steadily rose, the government soon abolished all rationing, and West Germany became renowned for its Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle.”

One of the most urgent internal problems for Adenauer’s first administration was the resettlement of refugees. By 1950 West Germany had become the new home of 4.5 million Germans from the territory east of the Oder-Neisse line; 3.4 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, prewar Poland, and other eastern European countries; and 1.5 million from East Germany. The presence of these refugees put a heavy social burden on West Germany, but their assimilation proved surprisingly easy. Many of the refugees were skilled, enterprising, and adaptable, and their labour proved an important contributor to West Germany’s economic recovery.

In East Germany the SED regime concentrated on building a viable economy in a territory that lacked rich natural resources, was less than one-half the size of the Federal Republic, and had a population (17 million) only one-third as large. The regime used its centralized control over a planned economy to invest heavily in the construction of basic industries at the expense of the production of consumer goods. Moreover, war reparations required that much productive capacity be diverted to Soviet needs. Despite an impressive rate of industrial growth, the standard of living remained low, lagging far behind that of West Germany. Even food was a problem, as thousands of farmers fled to West Germany each year rather than give in to mounting pressure to merge their land (which many had only recently obtained through the postwar agrarian reform) into the collective farms favoured by the communist regime. Food rationing had to be continued long after it had ended in West Germany. The resulting material hardships, along with relentless ideological indoctrination, repression of dissent, and harassment of churches by a militantly atheistic regime, prompted many thousands of East Germans to flee to West Germany every year. In 1952 East Germany sealed its borders with West Germany, but East Germans continued to leave through Berlin, where free movement still prevailed between the Soviet and Western sectors of the city.

In West Germany Adenauer followed a resolute policy of linking the new state closely with the Western democracies, even at the cost of perpetuating Germany’s division for the time being. In 1951 the chancellor succeeded in gaining membership for West Germany in the European Coal and Steel Community, which later served as the core of the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European Union. In that same year the Americans, British, and French agreed to a revision of the Occupation Statute that substantially increased the internal authority of the Federal Republic. Skillfully exploiting the Western fears of a communist assault on Europe, which had been awakened by the Korean War, Adenauer gained further concessions from the Western occupying powers in return for his agreement to rearm West Germany within the context of a western European defense system. In 1955 West Germany became a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and gained sovereignty over its foreign relations as the Occupation Statute expired.

With West Germany’s impressive economic recovery continuing, the voters confirmed the policies of the Adenauer government. In 1953 the coalition of the Christian and Free Democrats increased its previously thin majority. In 1957 the chancellor’s party achieved the first and only absolute majority ever recorded by a German party in a free general election. The FDP, who had left the government in 1956 over policy disputes, remained in opposition, along with the SPD.

Mounting dissatisfaction with the SED regime in East Germany led to the first popular uprising in the postwar Soviet bloc when workers in East Berlin, the seat of government, went on strike on June 17, 1953, to protest against increased production quotas. When the regime failed to respond, the workers took to the streets and demanded a change in government. The rebellion quickly spread throughout East Germany and was quelled only when Soviet troops intervened, killing at least 21 people and wounding hundreds of others. In the wave of retribution that followed, some 1,300 were sentenced to prison for taking part in the uprising, which the East German government portrayed as a plot by West Germany and the United States.

In the wake of the uprising, Stalin’s successors in the leadership of the Soviet Union upgraded the status of the German Democratic Republic. In 1954 Moscow ceased to demand reparations and proclaimed East Germany a sovereign state. In 1955 it became a charter member of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet bloc’s military alliance. The SED leadership loosened ideological controls on artistic and intellectual activities somewhat, increased the production of consumer goods, and relaxed pressure on farmers to enter collective farms. Agricultural yields improved, and the last food rationing ended in 1958. Within a few years, however, the government resumed its repressive measures and again shifted its economic priorities to favour the collectivization of agriculture and investment in heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. The flight of refugees through Berlin continued, with a high proportion of technicians, managers, and professionals among them.

In 1961 the flow of refugees to West Germany through Berlin increased dramatically, bringing the total number of East Germans who had fled since the war to some three million. On August 13, 1961, the East German government surprised the world by sealing off West Berlin from East Berlin and surrounding areas of East Germany, first with barbed wire and later by construction of a concrete wall through the middle of the city and around the periphery of West Berlin. East Germans could no longer go to the West through the tightly guarded crossing points without official permission, which was rarely granted. East Germans who sought to escape by climbing over the wall risked being shot by East German guards under orders to kill, if need be, to prevent the crime of “flight from the republic.” By thus imprisoning the population, the SED regime stabilized the economy of East Germany, which eventually became the most prosperous of the Soviet bloc but which nevertheless continued to lag behind that of West Germany in both the quantity and quality of its consumer goods. Under party boss Ulbricht, the East German government also tightened the repressive policies of what had become a totalitarian communist dictatorship. Upon the death of President Pieck in 1960, Ulbricht had assumed the powers of the presidency as head of a newly created Council of State. In 1968 he imposed a new constitution on East Germany that sharply curtailed civil and political rights.

In West Germany’s national election in 1961 the Christian Democrats suffered losses for the first time. The SPD, which had broadened its appeal by jettisoning the last remnants of its Marxist past and accepting the existing economic system in its Bad Godesberg program of 1959, scored impressive gains. Adenauer managed to retain the chancellorship by forming another coalition with the Free Democrats, but his position was weakened. He had tarnished his image in 1959 when he announced his candidacy for the presidency only to withdraw in favour of a lacklustre party colleague, Heinrich Lübke, when he realized that under the Basic Law the president had little power. The elderly chancellor was further weakened when in 1962 his defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, adopted high-handed methods in bringing about the arrest of the editors of the popular weekly news magazine Der Spiegel—which had been critical of Strauss—in connection with an alleged security leak. At the insistence of the Free Democrats, Adenauer relinquished the chancellorship in October 1963 to Erhard. Although the Erhard cabinet held its own in the election of 1965, the architect of the “economic miracle” himself fell from power in November 1966 when the Free Democrats withdrew their support because of disagreements over how to respond to a recession. For the next three years the Federal Republic was governed by a grand coalition of the two largest parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, with Christian Democrat Kurt Georg Kiesinger as chancellor and Social Democrat Willy Brandt as foreign minister.

Ostpolitik and reconciliation, 1969–89

When the SPD scored impressive gains in the election of 1969 and its candidate, Gustav Heinemann, also captured the presidency, West Germany underwent its first full-scale change of government. After 20 years of CDU-CSU domination, the SPD captured the chancellorship for Brandt in coalition with the FDP, whose leader Walter Scheel became foreign minister. This so-called social-liberal coalition carried through a number of domestic reforms, but its principal impact was on the Federal Republic’s relations with East Germany and the communist-ruled countries of eastern Europe. While confirming West Germany’s commitment to the Western alliance, the new government embarked upon a bold new “eastern policy,” or Ostpolitik.

Previously, West Germany had refused to recognize even the existence of the East German government. And by the terms of the Hallstein Doctrine (named for one of Adenauer’s key foreign-policy aides, Walter Hallstein), the Bonn authorities had refused to maintain diplomatic relations with all those countries (other than the Soviet Union) that recognized the German Democratic Republic. Now the Brandt-Scheel cabinet reversed these policies by opening direct negotiations with East Germany in 1970 to normalize relations between the two German states.

In 1970 the government entered into treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland that required Bonn to recognize the Oder-Neisse line as Germany’s eastern boundary. After the Soviet Union joined in 1971 with the Americans, British, and French in a Four Power Agreement that regularized Berlin’s status and opened the way for an easing of the West Berliners’ lot, in 1972 the Brandt-Scheel cabinet and East Germany concluded the Basic Treaty, which regularized the relations of the two German states. By its terms each side recognized, and agreed to respect, the other’s authority and independence. Each foreswore any title to represent the other internationally, which meant West Germany’s abandonment of its long-standing claim to be the sole legitimate spokesman of the German people. The two agreed to exchange “permanent missions,” which meant that their relations stopped short of full diplomatic recognition.

The new Ostpolitik met with bitter resistance within West Germany from the Christian Democrats, who denounced it as a surrender on many points that should await settlement by a peace treaty, including the status of the eastern territories that were severed from Germany in 1945. The Christian Democrats especially objected to the appearance that West Germany had given legitimacy to a dictatorial East Germany that refused to allow free elections, maintained the Berlin Wall, and ordered its border guards to shoot fleeing citizens. The Christian Democrats therefore pledged not to ratify the Basic Treaty if they regained power in the election of November 1972. The voters endorsed the Brandt government’s Ostpolitik, however, by making the SPD the largest party in the Bundestag (for the first time) and by strengthening their coalition partner, the FDP. The Basic Treaty was signed at the end of 1972, and in the following year both German states gained admission to the United Nations.

West Germany’s original overtures toward East Germany had met with resistance from Ulbricht, but the path for negotiations was cleared by a withdrawal of Soviet support that led to Ulbricht’s replacement by another communist functionary, Erich Honecker, as East German leader in 1971. In his last years, Ulbricht had experimented with a decentralization of economic decision making, but under Honecker East Germany reverted to Soviet-style centralized planning.

East Germany benefited greatly from the Basic Treaty. Once Bonn had accorded East Germany recognition, the Western democracies followed suit, so that the East German state at last enjoyed the international acceptance that it had long sought. Economically, the Basic Treaty also proved a boon to East Germany. Spurred by West German credits, trade between the two German states increased, yielding valuable West German currency for East Germany. The latter derived further income from annual fees paid to it by West Germany for Western travelers’ use of the highways through East Germany to Berlin and from ransoms paid by West Germany for the release of political prisoners held in East Germany. The larger number of West Germans allowed to visit East Germany also brought in hard currency. Each year the East German government reported impressive leaps in productivity, which, after the regime’s collapse, proved to be largely fictional. In actuality, the material gap between the two parts of Germany widened. In order to concentrate its resources on industrial production for export purposes, the East German government neglected to maintain the country’s infrastructure, which became increasingly apparent as East Germany’s roads, railways, and buildings deteriorated. An acute housing shortage also persisted. Waiting periods of years were still required for the purchase of major consumer items such as automobiles, which continued to be crudely manufactured according to standards of the early postwar period, while those of West Germany ranked high in the world for quality and advanced design.

The benefits of international recognition were offset by the dangers posed to the dictatorial East German government by increased contact with democratic West Germany as a result of the Basic Treaty’s easing of restrictions on visits by West Germans to East Germany. In an effort to deal with the subversive effects of such contacts, the East German government repeatedly sought to reduce the influx of West German visitors by raising the fees it charged for visas. It classified some two million of its citizens as “bearers of secrets” and forbade them personal contact with Westerners. To stifle dissent at home, the government tightened its already repressive ideological controls on artists and intellectuals, imprisoning some and stripping others of their citizenship and banishing them to West Germany. To emphasize the distinctness of the German Democratic Republic, an amended constitution was adopted in 1974 that minimized the use of the word “German” and stressed the socialist nature of the East German state and its irrevocable links with the Soviet Union.

In West Germany, Brandt resigned in May 1974 after one of his trusted aides was unmasked as a spy for East Germany. Brandt’s successor as chancellor was fellow Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, who continued the SPD-FDP coalition. When Walter Scheel of the FDP was elected federal president in 1974, his party colleague Hans-Dietrich Genscher succeeded him as foreign minister. Because the FDP’s laissez-faire elements resisted increases in the government’s role in the economy, the SPD was able to achieve little of its program for expanding the welfare state. In 1976 both the SPD and the FDP suffered electoral losses, but the coalition retained its majority; four years later, however, the coalition regained some ground.

The social-liberal coalition came to an end in October 1982 when the FDP, which had been suffering losses in local and regional elections, defected and formed a coalition with the Christian Democrats. The new chancellor was the veteran CDU politician Helmut Kohl, who had been the unsuccessful candidate of his party for that office in the 1976 election. To confirm the change of government, Kohl arranged for early elections in March 1983. The election yielded sizable gains for the Christian Democrats but heavy losses for the FDP, many of whose former supporters favoured collaboration with the SPD. The SPD also suffered heavy losses, most of which went to the new ecological party, the Greens, who gained entry to the Bundestag only a few years after their movement had formed in protest against the government’s indifference to environmental degradation.

Faced with mounting dissent at home, Honecker’s East German government sought to enhance its claims to legitimacy by seeking further recognition from West Germany. It was therefore buoyed when Chancellor Schmidt paid an often-postponed official visit to East Germany in December 1981. At that time Schmidt ignored Honecker’s demand that Bonn treat East Germans as foreigners and cease to bestow West German citizenship automatically on those who fled to the West. Nevertheless, after Schmidt’s visit East Germany began making it easier for its citizens to visit West Germany. By 1986 nearly 250,000 East Germans were visiting West Germany each year. As only one family member at a time was permitted to go, virtually all returned home. The East German government also began granting some of its dissatisfied citizens permission to emigrate to the West, an opportunity utilized each year in the 1980s by a few tens of thousands who managed to surmount formidable bureaucratic obstacles. These concessions were reciprocated by West Germany’s guarantee of several large Western bank loans to East Germany. In 1987 the East German government realized a long-held ambition when, after many postponements, Honecker was at last received in Bonn by Chancellor Kohl with full state honours, seemingly confirming West Germany’s acceptance of the permanence of the East German state.

But behind the Honecker government’s facade of stability, East Germany was losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of its citizenry. Particularly among younger East Germans, the new opportunities for travel to West Germany produced discontent rather than satisfaction. There they experienced a much more advanced, consumer-oriented society that provided its citizens with an abundance of far higher-quality goods than were available at home. While in West Germany, they chafed at having to depend materially on Western relatives because their own currency was virtually worthless outside East Germany. They also experienced full freedom of expression and an open marketplace of ideas and opinions that contrasted sharply with the rigid censorship and repression of deviant views at home. Once these East Germans had traveled or even heard of others’ travel, the Berlin Wall and the other border fortifications designed to restrict their movements seemed more onerous than ever. In protest against the East German government’s indifference to the damage its outdated industries were inflicting on the environment, a clandestine ecological movement came into being, and an underground independent peace movement took shape in protest against the regime’s manipulation of the cause of peace for propaganda purposes. Both of these movements found sanctuary in the churches of predominantly Protestant East Germany.

The reunification of Germany

The swift and unexpected downfall of the German Democratic Republic was triggered by the decay of the other communist regimes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The liberalizing reforms of President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union appalled the Honecker regime, which in desperation was by 1988 forbidding the circulation within East Germany of Soviet publications that it viewed as dangerously subversive. The Berlin Wall was in effect breached in the summer of 1989 when a reformist Hungarian government began allowing East Germans to escape to the West through Hungary’s newly opened border with Austria. By the fall, thousands of East Germans had followed this route, while thousands of others sought asylum in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, demanding that they be allowed to emigrate to West Germany. At the end of September, Genscher, still West Germany’s foreign minister, arranged for their passage to West Germany, but another wave of refugees from East Germany soon took their place. Mass demonstrations in the streets of Leipzig and other East German cities defied the authorities and demanded reforms.

In an effort to halt the deterioration of its position, the SED Politburo deposed Honecker in mid-October and replaced him with another hard-line communist, Egon Krenz. Under Krenz the Politburo sought to eliminate the embarrassment occasioned by the flow of refugees to the West through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. On the evening of November 9, Günter Schabowski, a communist functionary, mistakenly announced at a televised news conference that the government would allow East Germans unlimited passage to West Germany, effective “immediately.” While the government had in fact meant to require East Germans to apply for exit visas during normal working hours, this was widely interpreted as a decision to open the Berlin Wall that evening, so crowds gathered and demanded to pass into West Berlin. Unprepared, the border guards let them go. In a night of revelry tens of thousands of East Germans poured through the crossing points in the wall and celebrated their new freedom with rejoicing West Berliners.

The opening of the Berlin Wall proved fatal for the German Democratic Republic. Ever-larger demonstrations demanded a voice in government for the people, and in mid-November Krenz was replaced by a reform-minded communist, Hans Modrow, who promised free, multiparty elections. When the balloting took place in March 1990 the SED, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), suffered a crushing defeat. The eastern counterpart of Kohl’s CDU, which had pledged a speedy reunification of Germany, emerged as the largest political party in East Germany’s first democratically elected People’s Chamber. A new East German government headed by Lothar de Maizière, a long-time member of the eastern Christian Democratic Union, and backed initially by a broad coalition, including the eastern counterparts of the Social Democrats and Free Democrats, began negotiations for a treaty of unification. A surging tide of refugees from East to West Germany that threatened to cripple East Germany added urgency to those negotiations. In July that tide was somewhat stemmed by a monetary union of the two Germanys that gave East Germans the hard currency of the Federal Republic.

The final barrier to reunification fell in July 1990 when Kohl prevailed upon Gorbachev to drop his objections to a unified Germany within the NATO alliance in return for sizable (West) German financial aid to the Soviet Union. A unification treaty was ratified by the Bundestag and the People’s Chamber in September and went into effect on October 3, 1990. The German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic as five additional Länder, and the two parts of divided Berlin became one Land. (The five new Länder were Brandenburg, Mecklenburg–West Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia.)

In December 1990 the first all-German free election since the Nazi period conferred an expanded majority on Kohl’s coalition. After 45 years of division, Germany was once again united, and the following year Kohl helped negotiate the Treaty on European Union, which established the European Union (EU) and paved the way for the introduction of the euro, the EU’s single currency, by the end of the decade.

The achievement of national unification was soon shadowed by a series of difficulties, some due to structural problems in the European economy, others to the costs and consequences of unification itself. Like most of the rest of Europe, Germany in the 1990s confronted increased global competition, the increasing costs of its elaborate social welfare system, and stubborn unemployment, especially in its traditional industrial sector. However, it also faced the staggering added expenses of unifying the east and west. These expenses were all the more unsettling because they were apparently unexpected. Kohl and his advisers had done little to prepare German taxpayers for the costs of unification, in part because they feared the potential political consequences but also because they were themselves surprised by the magnitude of the task. The core of the problem was the state of the eastern German economy, which was far worse than anyone had realized or admitted. Only a handful of eastern firms could compete on the world market; most were woefully inefficient and also environmentally destructive. As a consequence, the former East German economy collapsed, hundreds of thousands of easterners faced unemployment, and the east became heavily dependent on federal subsidies. At the same time, the infrastructure—roads, rail lines, telephones, and the like—required massive capital investment in order to provide the basis for future economic growth. In short, the promise of immediate prosperity and economic equality, on which the swift and relatively painless process of unification had rested, turned out to be impossible to fulfill. Unemployment, social dislocation, and disappointment continued to haunt the new Länder more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The lingering economic gap between the east and west was just one of several difficulties attending unification. Not surprisingly, many easterners resented what they took to be western arrogance and insensitivity. The terms Wessi (“westerner”) and Ossi (“easterner”) came to imply different approaches to the world: the former competitive and aggressive, the product of what Germans call the West’s “elbow society”; the latter passive and indolent, the product of the stifling security of the communist regime. The PDS became the political voice of eastern discontents, with strong if localized support in some of the new Länder. Moreover, the neofascist German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion), led by millionaire publisher Gerhard Frey, garnered significant support among eastern Germany’s mass of unemployed workers. In addition to the resentment and disillusionment over unification that many easterners and some westerners felt, there was also the problem of coming to terms with the legacies left by 40 years of dictatorship. East Germany had developed a large and effective security apparatus (the Stasi), which employed a wide network of professional and amateur informants. As the files of this organization began to be made public, eastern Germans discovered that many of their most prominent citizens, as well as some of their friends, neighbours, and even family members, had been on the Stasi payroll. Coming to terms with these revelations—legally, politically, and personally—added to the tension of the postunification decade.

Despite the problems attending unification, as well as a series of scandals in his own party, Kohl won a narrow victory in 1994. In 1996 he surpassed Adenauer’s record as the longest-serving German chancellor since Bismarck. Nevertheless, his popularity was clearly ebbing. Increasingly intolerant of criticism within his own party, Kohl suffered a humiliating defeat when his first choice for the presidency was rejected. Instead, Roman Herzog, the president of the Federal Constitutional Court, was elected in May 1994 and fulfilled his duties effectively and gracefully. As Germany prepared for the 1998 elections, its economy was faltering—unemployment surpassed 10 percent and was double that in much of eastern Germany—and some members of Kohl’s party openly hoped that he would step aside in favour of a new candidate; instead the chancellor ran again and his coalition was defeated, ending his 16-year chancellorship. Kohl was replaced as chancellor by Gerhard Schröder, the pragmatic and photogenic leader of the SPD, which formed a coalition with the Green Party.

Schröder’s government got off to a rocky start, the victim of the chancellor’s own indecisiveness and internal dissent from his party’s left wing. The coalition also suffered from internal dissension within foreign minister Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s Green Party, which was divided between pragmatists such as Fischer and those who regarded any compromise as a betrayal of the party’s principles. In 1999 the government’s problems were swiftly overshadowed by a series of revelations about illegal campaign contributions to the CDU, which forced Kohl and his successor, Wolfgang Schäuble, to resign their leadership posts. In April 2000 the CDU selected as party leader Angela Merkel, who became the first former East German and first woman to lead a major political party in Germany.

Schröder’s government focused much of its efforts on reforming the German social welfare system and economy. In particular, the government wanted to reduce the costs of the generous but bloated welfare system; as the population was aging, the number of beneficiaries was increasing at a rate exceeding the number of contributors, threatening the solvency of the system. Moreover, the government attempted to relieve the burden on businesses of the country’s high taxes and labour costs, which had driven away foreign investment and encouraged German firms to close German plants and move them overseas. The government also aimed to eliminate the country’s reliance on nuclear power, agreeing to phase out its use by about 2022. In 2010 the government extended that deadline into the 2030s.

When the 2002 election campaign began, the government’s efforts to improve the economy had not succeeded. Economic growth remained sluggish, and unemployment (particularly in eastern Germany) remained high. Faced with a vigorous challenge from Edmund Stoiber, the head of Bavaria’s government, Schröder based much of his campaign on opposition to U.S. policy regarding the Iraqi regime of Ṣaddām Ḥussein—a view that was widely shared throughout Germany. As a result, Schröder and the Greens were able to win a narrow victory in September 2002. The new government attempted to build a consensus for economic reforms, which would require sacrifices from trade unions and other important parts of the Social Democrats’ constituency. At the same time, Schröder sought to repair the damaged relationship with the United States, though he opposed U.S.-led military action against Iraq in 2003. As the country’s economy continued to worsen, early elections were held in 2005. The CDU and CSU won a narrow victory, and a coalition government was formed with Merkel as chancellor; she became the first woman to hold that office.

At the start of the new millennium, Germany remained a leader in Europe and was the key to the continent’s security, stability, and prosperity. For more than 50 years, from Adenauer to Kohl, Schröder, and Merkel, Germans had played an important role in the creation of European institutions. Germany remains essential to the success of both the EU’s ambitious program of economic and political integration and its efforts to expand to include members from the former Soviet bloc. Germany will also be an important part of European efforts to craft a new security strategy, based on an enlarged NATO and a revised relationship with the United States.

In Germany’s parliamentary elections on Sept. 27, 2009, Merkel’s mandate as chancellor was renewed, this time with the CDU-CSU and the FDP winning enough seats to form a coalition. The SPD, which since 2005 had served as the junior partner in a grand coalition with the CDU-CSU, thus was forced into opposition. Germany comfortably weathered the debt crisis that shook the rest of the euro zone, and Merkel and French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy brokered a series of deals that were intended to contain the damage to the single currency.

While Merkel’s international presence was on the rise, she suffered domestically. The resignations of Pres. Horst Köhler in 2010, defense minister Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg in 2011, and Pres. Christian Wulff in 2012 were all blows to Merkel’s prestige. After Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011, Merkel pledged to phase out nuclear power in Germany by 2022, but this move came too late to boost the CDU’s performance in state elections later that month. In contrast, the Green Party, which had long opposed nuclear power, captured enough support to form a government in Baden-Württemberg, a CDU stronghold since 1953. Joachim Gauck was elected president of Germany in March 2012, becoming the third person to hold that office in as many years. Unaffiliated with any political party, Gauck was a popular choice for the largely ceremonial role because of his history as a pro-democracy dissident in East Germany and his supervision of the Stasi archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the first time since Germany’s reunification, the posts of both chancellor and president were held by individuals from the former East Germany.

Leaders of Germany

The table provides a chronological list of the leaders of Germany from 1871.